Shirley Collins has dedicated most of her life to the preservation and interpretation of British folk music, keeping traditions alive while also shaping them to the contemporary moment at the same time. Across the last 81 years, she’s collected enough firsthand experience to more than justify her legendary status in the folk world. In the late 1950s, she traveled the American South with famed musicologist Alan Lomax during one of his crucial field recording trips, and, in the ’60s and ’70s, made a series of important albums, often joined by her sister Dolly. The Sussex-born Collins sisters’ defining achievement came with 1969’s Anthems in Eden, on which they reinvigorated early-music instrumentation and showed how old ways could be made relevant for new generations.

But in 1978, following the flagrant infidelity of her second husband, Collins lost her voice and her confidence, and retired from performance. But her passion for the British music and history she loved remained undiminished. Two decades later, she returned to the stage for a series of multimedia talks about folk. Eventually, she was coaxed into rediscovering her singing voice. In November, she returned with Lodestar, her first album in 38 years.

At 81, Collins’ voice is weathered but robust—it resonates wisdom in song as well as in her most vivid musical memories, as told below, five years at a time.

We had a wind-up gramophone but we only had three shellac records. The favorite throughout the family was a cowboy song called “Will the Angels Play Their Harps for Me?” which I can still sing. This was 1945, the end of the war. I remember a lot of it, including when my sister and I were machine-gunned one day as we were wheeling our little cousin down the road.

By the middle of the war we’d learn to recognize which were our planes and which were the German planes. Mum had said, “If you see a plane, just dive into the nearest hedge—get away.” One day we saw this great plane coming up, and as it passed overhead it machine-gunned the road in front of us. We threw the pram under the hedge and escaped, but I can still see the bullets hitting the road and dust flying up from where they hit.

When I was young, my mum would take me to Communist meetings, which put me off politics for so long! She was quite a firebrand. She was also frightfully anti-American. She didn’t like Dolly and I listening to pop music at all, she felt it would corrupt us. But we liked it. The one I truly remember is “Two Brothers” by Kay Starr. It was a song about the American Civil War and how one brother is going to come home dead and there’s two girls waiting for them. Dolly and I were quite moved by it.

I always loved singing, and Dolly and I were in the choir at school. Every Saturday, we’d go to the library in the morning and then on to see a couple of pictures in the afternoon. There was always an A-film, that was the big one, and then a B-movie. One day we saw a B-movie called Night Club Girl, about a folk singer girl from the Tennessee mountains who was discovered by a talent scout from New York who made her into a star. I thought, Oh, that’ll do for me. I think I’m going to be a folk singer. That was it. I was so wound up by the idea that I wrote to the BBC to say I wanted to be a singer. They would play proper field recordings of traditional singers singing unaccompanied, and that really appealed to me. I had an absolute longing to be a person who sang those songs.

Writing into the BBC was an absolute shot into the dark. I had no idea how things worked; I was a working-class girl from Hastings who had only been away from home as an evacuee. But they handed the letter to Bob Copper, who from a traditional singing family in Sussex who was doing field recordings for the BBC at that time. He turned up at our house one day to listen to us.

Dolly and I had been learning songs from the radio and we picked up one rather long, rather heavy Scottish ballad that we decided to sing for Bob—inasmuch as we could manage in a Scottish accent. It was totally the wrong thing to do. But luckily Bob had teenaged children of his own so he understood what was going on. That was my first meeting with Bob. It transformed my life, because then I learned about the Copper family and all their wonderful songs. We had a really close friendship. Just a few years before he died [in 2004] he showed me his worksheet for that day and it said: “Shirley Collins. Occupation: School girl.” That’s something I still treasure.

By this time, I had moved to London and was getting to know people in the folk community. I was invited to a party for Alan Lomax, the American collector who was coming back to England after recording traditional music in the field in Italy and Spain. I can only describe him as a big burly Texan with a great big head of shaggy dark hair. He reminded me of an American bison, an animal that I absolutely loved, having seen them in cowboy films. I fell in love on the spot, partly because I also fell in love with the music he collected. It was an irresistible force.

He was in London writing a big book, The Folk Songs of North America, and I started working with him. But then the time came for him to go back to the States. By then we were in a proper relationship, and I’d lived with him for two or three years. I was heartbroken when he said he wasn’t going to take me with him. But we kept in touch by letter. One day he invited me to join him in the States on a field trip he was planning, and I leapt at the chance. In 1959, I caught the SS United States and went over the water to America to join Alan, and off we went down through the deep South. It was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything in the world—from little Hastings in little Sussex to see this great continent spread out in front of me was extraordinary. And to be able to meet some of the people who still sang songs from England—what they called the “old country”—was so fascinating.

We’d gone through Kentucky, Virginia, and Alabama, and headed up into Northern Mississippi. There was some poverty there, but they played lots of old music, from the American Civil War and before, songs of slaves. We recorded over three or four days, getting some remarkable music. Some people said to us, “We’ve got a neighbor who sings the blues.” And I thought, “Oh no, I don’t want to hear blues, I don’t want anything more modern to come in and ruin the spell of this old music.” But out of courtesy we said OK. That evening, a slight figure appeared out of the trees into a clearing, carrying a guitar and wearing his work dungarees, because he’d been picking cotton all day. He sat down and started with “61 Highway” on his slide guitar—a shimmering, metallic sound. He sang so wonderfully, with such strength. I thought, Thank goodness we agreed to hear him. It was the very first time he had been recorded. I was so thrilled that I was there at the discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell. At at the end of it, Alan wrote just one word in his notebook: “Perfect.” And so it was.

By the end of 1959, Alan said to me, “I’m going to send you back home now.” I knew it was inevitable. And truly, I wanted to get back to being English, because that’s where I’m from. So I came home.

I didn’t talk much about my adventures with Alan when I got back. I don’t know why. I was singing one or two American songs, but I was really trying to immerse myself in English music. I’ve been so lucky, in a way, to be in the right place at the right time. I used to go to [folk music center] Cecil Sharp House to look in the library and listen to recordings. One day in the cellar was a Sussex singer in his 70s called George Maynard. To meet this man and hear him sing in the flesh was absolutely wonderful, even though his voice was old—a bit like the one I’ve got now. You can’t keep your beautiful voice all your life. I fell in love with both George and “Polly on the Shore,” which is a song about a sea battle, and the loss of love and life during the Napoleonic wars.

Around this time, the skiffle craze was starting up, which some people thought was great, because anybody could do it. But that didn’t satisfy me. I went into a club in London that had a notice outside the front that said “Folk and Blues Club.” So I went downstairs to listen and there was hardly any blues, and no folk at all. It was mostly skiffle. So I got my lipstick out and crossed out the word “folk” off the poster. The owner of the club came up and said to me, “If you ever do that again, I’ll use this,” and he brought out a knife! I learned to be slightly more careful about my protests after that.

Dolly and I used to go along to rehearsals at the Early Music Consort in London. It was there that we first heard the instrument Dolly was to use for our next few albums, a little portable pipe organ that was based on one made in the 17th century in Bucharest. It had this lovely fluting note that we thought would fit very well with my voice, and Dolly could write arrangements for keyboards because she had trained as a composer in her earlier years.

One of the musicians at the Consort was David Munrow, a young man just crackling with life, whom we became friends with. He agreed to be the music producer for our first album, [1969’s] Anthems in Eden, where we used early music instruments. I just loved the blend of sounds, the roughness of the instruments—they’re not pure. Dolly wrote such gorgeous arrangements because she understood English music and also understood the instruments that she was writing for. The record gave people an idea of what traditional music was and could sound like, and how it could state things that were important.

By this time I had just married my second husband, Ashley Hutchings, and was in the Albion Band, a much louder, electric band; it was the first time an electric band was playing English country dance and early music tunes, and people loved it. They flocked to the dances and danced wonderfully. The music was so powerful and energizing. I used to love doing those gigs. It was new. It had broken the bounds of rather prissy little dance bands that didn’t play with much energy.

Ashley left, and I lost my voice. I was losing confidence, it was leaking out almost daily. I just about managed to record [1978’s] For as Many as Will, and I tried to continue to sing a bit. By that time Dolly had a young baby, and she didn’t want to travel much. I had two children and I didn’t have any money. I tried singing with a couple of other people, but I couldn’t rely on my voice at all. It was humiliating. Every time I opened my mouth, it grew worse. I had to stop. I wasn’t doing the songs any justice, and that was so important to me. I didn’t want to lose my reputation, such as it was. The more this happened, the more I just thought, I can’t deal with this any longer. So I turned to working other jobs. I call them my wilderness years, because I had to just turn my hand to other things to keep us all going.

I couldn’t bear to listen to other people singing that much because I just felt so removed from it, as if I had no right to it. But Nic Jones and I were good friends. He ran a folk club, and I was invited to sing there a few times when I could still sing. What Nic represented for me was such a fine singer, such a lovely man, so manly in his singing—with understanding and sensitivity. And “Master Kilby” is just one of the great English songs, a couple of verses still move me to tears when I hear them. Nic had a dreadful accident [in 1982], I think every bone in his body was broken. What he went through was far worse than what I went through. And he’s back singing today. We sort of came back at the same time. He’s just as funny and as wonderful as ever.

This is utterly beautiful music Mark Knopfler wrote for the film Local Hero, which had Burt Lancaster in it, who I’d always loved. It’s just a fabulous film: Very touching, very funny, and this marvelous music weaving its way through. You almost want to leap to your feet at the end when it all comes together in a great big surge. It gives me goosebumps on my arm just remembering how that music affected me when I first heard it.

Although this song by the Band was released in 1969, I hadn’t heard it then. But once I had, it became a lifelong favorite—it’s so powerful. This was well into my wilderness years and somehow this song and the Band gave me strength and comfort.

At this point I’d got this variety of jobs, from working in the bookshop at the British Museum to becoming public relations person at Cecil Sharp House, which I regretted within a week. I managed an Oxfam [charity] shop for three or four years, and then took a job at the job centre for the next five or six. And then, thank god, I got to be 60 and could retire and take my state pension.

Alan sent me a copy of the wonderful book he’d written, The Land Where the Blues Began, and I got one mention in it. He wrote, “Shirley Collins, the lovely young English singer who was along for the trip.” I won’t say “fuck,” but I was so angry! I thought, No, I’ve got to sort this out, this is disgraceful.

At the same time my mother said to me, “Would you like your letters from America back, Shirley?” She’d kept all the letters I’d written home, so I was able to start writing my own book. I did point out my role and that I deserved a bit more than “being along for the trip,” because it was really hard work and I think he did better with having me there. I had put a fairly harsh ending on the first edition of the book where I mention his quote and said, “We’ll see about that.” And then he died a couple of years later. For the second edition, I just couldn’t keep that line in. I had to make it a requiem about Alan. You can’t deny the man his absolute worth. I was just so cross that first time. It’s what blokes do, though—they just dismiss women’s roles in the work that’s done. I just couldn’t put up with it that time.

I don’t listen to much pop music, but when I saw Pretty Woman, and this music started up, I was so excited by it. I just didn’t get tired of it. It’s such a wonderfully shaped song, to start. The energy is great. And it sounds like real men singing it, which I like. And I love the film still. It was a bit of a departure for me to really, really, really like this song and just want to keep listening to it. I must be a bit obsessive, really.

Dolly died in 1995, so I’ve chosen “Never Again,” written by Richard Thompson. At the time [in 1978], it was sung about my breakup with Ashley. But as the years went by, I think about Dolly and “Never Again” being something that’s real now, being here without Dolly, even though I’ve still got her music to listen to and I’ve still got so many memories of her. I’ve got this double memory of Dolly as a person and a musician and somebody I worked with and loved very much. It’s such a beautiful, brief song about loss.

I was offered a job out of the blue around this time—they wanted a folk animateur for the South East Folk Arts Network. I didn’t know what an animateur was, but I went along for the interview and got the job. It involved spreading the knowledge of Sussex and Southern England music through the community, because nobody really knows much about it. It got me mixing with folk singers again and got me back into a slightly different mindset—that there might be something I could do to help spread the word even though I couldn’t really sing still.

My book [America Over the Water] came out in 2004 and in the meantime I’d been sent a round of records, reissued from that Southern journey in the States. It was wonderful to start listening to these things again. After the book was quite a success in its limited field, I wanted to share it because there were so many stories to tell and such great music to play. My best friend Pip Barnes is an actor, so we had this semi-dramatized show where I was doing readings from the book and Pip was doing bits and dancing wonderful American step-dancing, which I just love. So we took that on the road and it lasted for the next few years.

After that, I started to write shows about other forms of English music. I was back in folk music but this time as a writer, spreading the knowledge of it. I do like talking to people and trying to give them some sort of inkling of why this music is so fantastic and fascinating.

John Davis’ “Moses Don’t Get Lost” is the very first track from mine and Alan’s trip to the Georgia Sea Islands, which was the last port of call on the field trip. Those islands had been settled by escaped slaves, so a lot of their really old songs were from slavery times. John Davis was one of the fisherman and he just has the most gorgeous voice, he goes down so deep.

English gypsy singers are so incredible. They have their own style but they sing virtually all traditional songs. This recording was made by Peter Kennedy at a gypsy encampment just a few miles outside Lewes, where I lived in the ’50s. The minute I heard this song I was just so captivated by her childish voice and her wonderful accent. It really is just the most charming field recording I’ve ever heard.

My friend Pip suggested I read the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian, which are all set in the British Navy in the 18th and 19th centuries. I thought, Oh god. I don’t want to read about the Navy. But they are the most beautifully written books: The detail, the speech, everything about them is just so convincingly about that time. There are 21 in all. Once I’d started the first one I just had to continue. A film was made of one of the books, Master and Commander with Russell Crowe, and this music, by Thomas Tallis, was used in the battle scenes. The whole thing sums up everything that I love about English literature, English language, and English music.

Shirley Collins: Lodestar

My new album is all down to David Tibet of Current 93, who came to see me over 20 years ago when I was living in Brighton and not able to sing. When he said that he liked my music, I burst into tears and said, “I thought I’d been forgotten.” Over the years he was very patient, trying to persuade me to sing. He invited me several times to appear at concerts, and I said “no” very firmly at first. And then I started to say, “perhaps,” and then I started to say, “all right, yes.” Finally, about 18 months ago, he said, “We’ve got a concert, will you come and do two songs?” And I did it! Which must have surprised me more than anybody else. The audience was so lovely. It gave me the will to do more.

By that time I started to feel a bit more ambitious. Finally, my son went to his friend Laurence [Bell] at Domino Records and said, “We’ve gotten in a bit of a quandary: Shirley wants to record an album and she doesn’t know where to go with it.” And Laurence said, “We’ll have it.” He took it on trust. I was given the freedom to choose my own material, which I’d always done anyway, and to record it at home. We just took it very easy, had lots of fun. I invited musicians that I knew and trusted. And finally there’s a whole album’s worth. It feels good. The turning point for my voice was when Pip reminded me that I’ve always loved listening to field recordings of unaccompanied singers who are in their 70s or older. He said, “That’s the voice you’ve got. You’re one of them now.”